Should I Invest More In Digital Marketing? – Bell Bytes

Intro

Hey folks! Welcome to this edition of Bell Bytes. We’ll be discussing the question “should I invest more?” What I mean by that is asking the question “Should I invest more in my digital marketing for a product or service that I’m selling or offering to a community?”

There are some great tools that you can utilize that can help you answer that question. My hope today is that we’ll go through a few tips and tricks that you can learn to determine if investing more in your online strategy will yield greater results for you. We’ll go through an example as well. So let’s go ahead and get started.

Research and Model

The first thing that we need to do is research and model it out.

Document your SERP rankings for high-value keywords and phrases.

SERP means search engine results page. So, think about it like this: You go to google. You type something in and you get all of these different options to click on. That is what we call the SERP.

I want you to go through and think about your business. Maybe you own a heating an air business. Think about all of the products and services that you offer. Also think about what you believe individuals are going to Google and typing in to find your business. If you’re an AC company, maybe it’s not always need an air conditioner. Maybe it’s that somebody’s air conditioner is broken and that’s actually what they’re typing in.

I want you to go through and document all of the products and services that you offer as well as what you believe people are typing into Google. That’s an important first step.

Determine your SERP landscape and competitiveness

Let’s just say that I was in a local market and I conducted a search for an AC unit provider in my market. Chances are, it’s going to be very competitive. There’s going to be four paid placements, four paid ads, at the very top, followed by ten additional organic rankings, followed by more ads on the bottom. So, knowing if it’s a very competitive bidding structure on Google is a very important component that we’ll get into momentarily.

Google Keyword Planner

After you’ve developed all of those high-value keywords and phrases that you might want to advertise or bid on in Google, you want to use the Google Keyword Planner. The Google Keyword Planner is something that anyone can use and it’s free. It does take a little bit of getting use to and any digital agency out there should be able to help you with this. By using the Google Keyword Planner, you’re able to take your high-value keywords and phrases, put them into the planner, and from that, you’ll actually be able to determine how many searches were done on Google over the last 30-day period. So, why is that important? Well, if you’re determining if you should invest more in your online marketing, knowing how many people or how many searches are being done in your market area for your specific products every month is a GREAT place to start.

Don’t forget, by using the Google Keyword Planner, you’re only pulling Google search queries. You need to factor in Yahoo and Bing as well. Yahoo/Bing accounts for 20-25% of all searches, so whatever you get from the Google Keyword Planner, make sure you account an additional 20-25% of search volume in Yahoo and Bing.

Building an ROAS Model

The last step is building a return on ad spend model for your high-value products and services. Let’s dig into an example.

The customer that we’ll be sharing today is called the Aesthetic & Spa Company. They went through and determined that their highest value keywords for their products and services that they offered surrounded botox, fillers and laser hair removal. They offer a lot of different products. Anybody can walk in the door and buy their product or service, but they determined that these (botox/fillers/laser hair removal) had an average customer value between $1,200-$3,000, depending on how many visits someone made or the product line that they were purchasing.

They used the Google Keyword Planner to look at all the searches in their market for botox, fillers, laser hair removal and all other key phrases that they thought people wanted to actually search for. What it returned is that monthly area market searches equaled about 11,500. So, what that means is that 11,500 searches were taking place online for people looking for botox, fillers, laser hair removal or similar products and services. That’s a great basis to determine if it makes sense in furthering your efforts (marketing) in these products.

It also returned that the average monthly cost (to advertise on Google) would be about $2,500 if they wanted to show up for all of those searches. We call that share of voice, impression share, but they wanted to show up for 100% of all searches and $2,500 is what it would cost.

After the campaign ran, here are the metrics.

The client had a 3% CTR (click-thru rate) that yielded 346 clicks on their ads that went to landing pages. Let’s assume they had nice landing pages and they generated a good, solid conversion rate of 8%. Conversion rates vary by industry and competitiveness, but if you have a really good landing page, that’s going to help you boost conversion rates. That 8% conversion rate resulted in 28 calls, form fills and chats. Those were the conversions that they were looking for. They wanted leads. Out of those 28 calls, form fills and chats, they closed 5 new customers. If they took 5 (customers) times their average customer annual spend of $2,100, they generated $10,500 in gross revenue from their campaign.

Conclusion

Now it’s up to them to determine if that ROAS model made sense. A way that you can determine this is sometimes running a campaign, but a great basis for running a campaign, is documenting your SERP, understanding the Google Keyword Planner, how many searches are being done and then formulating a good ROAS model to see if it makes sense for your business.

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